1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing technology, and it particularly relates to an image processing method and an image coding apparatus utilizing the image processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the twentieth century, which was often called “The Century of Images,” a great variety of pictures and images were produced and put to use in movies, TV broadcasts and so forth. During the 1990's in particular, the widespread use of PCs (personal computers) and other information equipment, the popularization of digital cameras, color printers and so forth and the explosive increase in the use of the Internet accounted for deep infiltration of the culture of digital images into everyday life of ordinary people. Under these circumstances, coding and compression technologies, such as JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) for still images and MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) for moving images, have been standardized so as to improve the facility of distribution and reproduction of the images through recording media, such as CD-ROM, and transmission media, such as networks and broadcasting waves. JPEG2000, which is an advanced version in the JPEG series, has already been announced, and the middle- to long-term targets for MPEG have already been worked out, too. Therefore, the on-going and future sophistication of image processing technologies will without doubt lead us deeper into the world of digital images.
The technological advance in such apparatuses as digital cameras and scanners that produce image data is so remarkable that images with higher resolution and higher quality can be acquired very easily. As the resolution of images becomes higher, the data amount increases as might be expected and the coding technology is expected to play a very important role to cope with this increased amount of image data. Though efforts to seek the excellent data structures are to be made constantly of course on one hand, the improved efficiency in processing the coding compression, that is, the technology by which to realize coding compression processing with further reduced processing time and minimum hardware resource is very much in demand, on the other hand.